‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

WASILLA — Director Grant Olson said it “took some arm twisting” to get “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” on the Season 41 program schedule at Valley Performing Arts.

Though Olson called the play one of the “top 3 American dramas ever written,” he acknowledged that the foul language and sexual themes — not to mention depressing and at times violent content — make the play “controversial, no doubt.”

“We’ve never done a show like this,” he said.

Shortly after its 1962 debut, “Virginia Woolf” won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1963. It was also selected for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1963, but the award was rescinded by the advisory board, and none was given to another play that year.

Olson said he first saw the show performed in the late 1960s between high school and college. It wasn’t what he was expecting.

“I had heard it was a very dramatic and kind of depressing play … so I went with some foreboding, and then I laughed all the way through the first act, and the audience was laughing with me,” he said. “Boy, it just went like a roller coaster.”

The show begins with Martha and George returning home late at night from a faculty party at the university owned by Martha’s father, where George works. Martha is drunk and George is irritable — even more so when his wife reveals that she has invited guests over at 2 a.m.

Nick and Honey, a couple about half George and Martha’s age, arrive in the middle of an argument between the older pair, but the hosts assure them all is well.

The gibes are not all malevolent at first, but grow increasingly more scathing as the evening goes on. Still, Nick and Honey cannot find opportunity to leave.

“This is … a very realistic play with absurdist overtones,” Olson said. “It can be read on so many different levels.”

For her part, Tracy Jones says Martha should be a sympathetic character, if not the most sympathetic character in the play, despite her seemingly unreasonable hostility.

“I feel like she’s just striving and fighting for something that could potentially make her happy, but yet she is so full of self-hate that she doesn’t feel like she deserves to be happy, so she rips everything apart anyway … and I guarantee that every single woman in this world has been there, where they don’t like, love themselves,” Jones said. “They create their own self destruction because they feel like they know that they don’t deserve more.”

Jones said it was the “raw emotion” and depth of the story that drew her to the play in the first place, though she didn’t audition because she was finishing up with “Harvey,” which she directed and acted in last month. But when the woman who was first cast as Martha had to drop out two weeks ago due to “walking pneumonia,” Olson said, Jones was ready and willing.

“This is definitely the shortest amount of time and the biggest amount of material (I’ve had to memorize,” she said, but, “the material isn’t difficult to learn because it’s just like, so good.”

Olson seemed proud of his cast, which he said may be the smallest in VPA history.

“They’re very difficult roles, the chemistry is really good, and they’ve really risen to the occasion,” he said. “I’ve thrown down the gauntlet, they’ve taken on the challenge.”

Ted Carney, who plays opposite Jones as George, said “the challenge” was exactly why he auditioned for “Virginia Woolf” — probably the most “intense” play he had ever performed in, he said, next to “Night of the Iguana” in 2009.

He said he wouldn’t be surprised if a few people walked out because of the language or because they just didn’t like it, but he suspected people would be just as likely to walk out because they see themselves in a character, and it’s upsetting to them.

Or, a person might stay and like the play because they identify with a character, he said.

Whatever the case may be, “these are the kind of plays that people don’t forget,” Carney said.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” opens Friday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 for adults, $18 for students and seniors, available for purchase online at www.valleyperformingarts.org or by phone, 373-0195.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.